Arnold Bax and Serge Prokofiev did not have much in common as composers, but they both died in 1953, and while the Prokofiev anniversary has been the excuse for many unnecessary events in the concert hall and on disc, Bax's death has hardly been commemorated at all. Chandos's new set of the Bax symphonies, though, is the best possible tribute. It is a superbly played and sumptuously recorded survey of the seven works that were central to Bax's output as an orchestral composer, and the core of his musical achievement, interpreted by one of the great English-music specialists of our time, who arguably has done more for Bax's cause than any other living conductor.

This set seems as much a celebration of Vernon Handley as it is of Bax; it squeezes in an extra disc containing an hour-long interview with Handley by Andrew McGregor, while the printed notes are also based on conversations with the conductor. In both, Handley makes his admiration for the symphonies crystal clear, and includes them with a whole body of music from the first half of the 20th century that he feels has been unfairly overlooked in concert halls in favour of more recent works by living composers. While it's certainly true that the orchestral programming in this country is far narrower than it should be, I'm not so sure about Handley's claim - a composer like Vaughan Williams surely gets more performances than any living figures, and his idea that the composers who reacted against Mahler's influence have fared less well historically than those who built upon it could be debated too. Yet there is no doubt that Bax's symphonies have fallen into that black hole in the repertory to which the conductor refers, and as these performances demonstrate, that neglect is often unjust.

What is intriguing about Bax's development as a composer is the way in which symphonic writing occupied only a relatively short, concentrated period of his creative career. Born in 1883, his Symphony No 1 was not completed until 1922, when he was almost 40, and the Seventh and last was written immediately before the outbreak of the second world war in 1939, when he was still in his 50s. That kind of chronology does mean, however, that Bax was already at the height of his powers when he turned to the symphony. There is no sense of Bax feeling his way in the First Symphony; it emerges as a stark and dramatic response to the aftermath of the first world war and also, as Handley suggests, as a memorial to Bax's Irish friends who had died in the Easter Rising. It is couched in an orchestral technique that had already been honed in a series of overtures and tone poems (like the famous Tintagel, included in this set), and with a control of large-scale musical structure (all seven symphonies are in three movements) that is both highly personal and totally coherent.

That is not to say that the symphonies are all as good as one another. Just occasionally his music does take refuge in the kind of generic folksiness that was the bane of so much British music in the 1920s, and comes as even more of a surprise from a composer whose most famous observation was that he was willing to try anything once, "except incest and English folk dancing". The Fourth Symphony from 1930 also has its weaknesses, as if Bax was uneasy about composing an extrovert, affirmative work, and was psychologically more drawn towards dark-hued, fundamentally pessimistic musical schemes. The two works that seem to me the best, the Fifth from 1931-32, dedicated to Sibelius, and the Sixth, completed three years later, also with its Sibelian resonances (a quotation from Tapiola is woven into the final movement), are successful symphonies by any post-Mahlerian standards.

Handley and the BBC Philharmonic strain all their musical sinews to bring out every detail of these highly wrought and texturally complex works, and Handley's command of structure and pacing is majestic. His approach seems more generous and indulgent than that of David Lloyd-Jones on his series of the Bax symphonies for Naxos; if Lloyd-Jones places Bax firmly in a 20th-century tradition, then Handley's view is fonder and more nostalgic. Some listeners will prefer one approach, some the other. Where Chandos definitely scores over Naxos is in the quality of its recordings, which are far warmer, more immediate and detailed than their rivals. Both cycles, though, do Bax's achievement proud.